The Breakfast Club (& Gravy)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

AP’s Today in History for October 29th

‘Black Tuesday’ on Wall St. as the Great Depression begins; Osama bin Laden admits ordering the Sept. 11th attacks; Suez crisis heats up Mideast; McKinley assassin executed; John Glenn returns to space.

Breakfast Tune Beans Bacon & Gravy

Something to think about, Breakfast News & Blogs below

90% of world’s children are breathing toxic air, WHO study finds
Matthew Taylor, The Guardian

Poisonous air is having a devastating impact on billions of children around the world, damaging their intelligence and leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, according to a report from the World Health Organization.

The study found that more than 90% of the world’s young people – 1.8 billion children – are breathing toxic air, storing up a public health time bomb for the next generation.

The WHO said medical experts in almost every field of children’s health are uncovering new evidence of the scale of the crisis in both rich and poor countries – from low birth weight to poor neurodevelopment, asthma to heart disease.

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• Election expert Greg Palast: Thanks to GOP voter suppression, “Democrats may have effectively lost”
  MATTHEW ROZSA

• ‘I’d Like To Be President,’ Says Chappaqua’s Hillary Clinton, Adding She’ll ‘Think About’ Run
  Joe Lombardi

• Why American leaders persist in waging losing wars
  WILLIAM J. ASTORE

• Economists reverse claims that $15 Seattle minimum wage hurt workers, admit it was largely beneficial
  CORY DOCTOROW

• Democrats: Don’t go high or low. Go big and bold
  ROBERT REICH

Something to think about over coffee prozac

 
Changing clocks twice a year is bad for health and energy use
Simon Oxenham, New Scientist

Are you feeling tired today? Much of the UK got up an hour earlier than usual this morning, following the start of daylight savings. But there’s evidence that the clocks changing can have much more serious effects too, including heart attacks and strokes.

There’s little doubt that British Summer Time (BST) brings benefits, including reducing energy usage nationwide by allowing us to make better use of daylight hours. This has led to repeated calls for BST to last all year round, to cut carbon emissions and let us enjoy more of the country’s limited winter afternoon sunshine.

The act of switching to daylight savings every year also seems to harm some people’s health. Studies have found an annual spike in heart attacks in Michigan in the US and strokes in Finland the day after the clocks go forward in spring. Many of these deaths are likely to have been in frail, elderly people who are at the mercy of care staff schedules. But some could be due to loss of sleep: there’s evidence that heart attacks are most common on Mondays, possibly due to sleep lost while readjusting to the schedule of the working week.

The UK has tried year-round BST. The result was a large reduction in road casualties between 1968 and 1971, thanks to the lighter evenings, but the experiment was ended due to complaints from northern parts of the UK, where mornings were darker as a result.

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